Tag Archives: movie reviews

James O’Meara’s article on “Essential Films . . . & Others” was inspired by my “Ten Favorite Films,” but it inspired me in turn to reflect on my own list of essential films, essential defined by Coleridge as “that to which with the greatest pleasure the reader returns.” For many of my favorite films are not works to which I return with pleasure. Vertigo and Blue Velvet, for instance, are too emotionally harrowing to just pop in on a rainy afternoon. So this spurred me to reflect on the movies I watch, again and again, simply for pleasure: if I am under the weather, too tired to work, or just want to savor my solitude. Read more …

Looking over Trevor Lynch’s list of his “Ten Favorite Films” in his forthcoming collection, Son of Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies, it occurred to me that I couldn’t possibly put together such a list, even if I could decide on a criterion or two.

The Loved One (1965) is my all-time favorite comedy. Based on a 1948 novel of the same name by Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One stands alongside Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (the book and the movie) as a savagely on-target, dark comic satire on American Protestant civilization.

In his remake of King Kong, Peter Jackson dragged out the big ape’s death so long it felt like a lifetime. At the time, it merely seemed like a lapse of taste. In hindsight, it seems like the beginning of a whole new career characterized by megalomania, greed, one-upmanship, self-indulgence, and bad taste. It was just the first symptom of the dragon sickness that has now consumed him.

The Battle of Five Armies begins with Smaug giving Laketown the Dresden treatment, Read more …

“The whole film is filled with a feeling of heat and agony, a constantly blazing sun shining down into a barren waste land of dead cars and dead bodies. Flashes of hope are rare and always beaten down with such hatred and force that the viewer almost hopes it won’t come back . . .” — (IMDb review)

Helene Bertha Amalie “Leni” Riefenstahl was born on this day in Berlin in 1902. She died in Pöcking, Bavaria, on September 8, 2003, just after her 101st birthday. She was a highly accomplished dancer, actress, photographer, and film director. Read more …